The Central Bank has sold a further €500 million of bonds linked to a refinancing in 2013 of the bailout of failed lender, Anglo Irish Bank.
The Central Bank received €25 billion of Government bonds in February 2013 under a complex restructuring of promissory notes used by the Government during the financial crisis to rescue Anglo Irish, which was subsequently renamed Irish Bank Resolution Corporation (IBRC).
IBRC had been using the promissory notes as collateral for emergency funding with the Central Bank. When the failed lender was put into liquidation in February 2013, the State replaced those notes with bonds.
The National Treasury Management Agency said on Monday that it acquired the latest €500 million of notes from the Central Bank and subsequently cancelled them. This means that the NTMA has bought and cancelled a total of €6.5 billion of the IBRC-linked bonds.
The latest bonds purchased were originally due to mature in June 2014.
To ease concerns at the European Central Bank at the time of the refinancing of the bailout four years ago, the Central Bank in this country agreed to sell off at least €2.5 billion of the bonds by the end of 2018. It is well ahead of that schedule.
